Household Contents Appraisals
Whole-house inventories for estate settlement, divorce division, and insurance loss.
Personal property valuation is not a state-licensed activity. These assignments are performed as desk appraisals from photographs and documentation, which means NextPhase accepts them anywhere in the United States and internationally.
What drives the number
A full contents assignment is a different discipline from valuing a single object. The work is inventory, lotting, and defensible sampling — producing a schedule an executor, a court, or an adjuster can actually work from.
Commonly appraised
- Complete estate contents
- Room-by-room inventories
- Post-loss claim documentation
- Divorce equitable distribution schedules
- Downsizing and disposition planning
- Storage unit contents
What we'll need from you
- Room-by-room photographs, wide shots plus detail on anything significant
- Any existing inventory or insurance schedule
- Access arrangements if inspection is needed
- Which parties will receive the report
- Any items already claimed or distributed
Contents assignments are quoted per engagement rather than per item. Most are completed from documentation; complex or disputed estates may warrant on-site inventory.
What actually moves the number
Every asset class has its own small number of factors that do most of the work. For household contents they are these, and they are the reason a general-purpose valuation and a considered one can be so far apart.
Almost all of it is worth less than people expect, and a little of it is worth more
The reliable pattern in whole-house work is that the bulk of the contents carries modest value while two or three items nobody flagged carry most of it. The value of the exercise is finding those, and the value of the report is that it says which is which rather than producing one number.
Fair market value is not replacement cost
What it would cost to replace a sofa is not what the sofa would fetch. Estates and divisions want the second figure and it is almost always the lower one. Owners consistently and reasonably carry the first number in their heads, and that gap is where most disputes over contents start.
Lotting is the real skill
Deciding what gets its own number and what gets grouped is what determines whether the report is usable and what it costs. Itemising a kitchen is waste; grouping a signed piece into "miscellaneous décor" is a defect. The report states the lotting decisions so a reader can see them.
The effective date fixes everything
For an estate it is the date of death, not the date the house was cleared and not today. Contents get moved, sold and given away in the months between, which is why photographs and an inventory taken early are worth so much more than memory later.
Who reads the finished report
The executor is the primary reader, and their problem is usually a beneficiary who has looked at retail asking prices online and formed a different view. The report has to be explicable to that person. Where a return is filed it goes to the IRS; where the estate is contested it may go to a court; where it supports a donation of the residual contents to a charity, the specific description requirement applies to whatever exceeds the threshold.
How the fee gets set
Contents price on the number of lots and on how many need individual analysis, not on the size of the house. The fastest way to a firm quote is photographs of each room from two corners plus close photographs of anything you think might matter — that is usually enough to scope the whole job in one pass.
What arrived
Room-by-room photographs of a three-bedroom house, and a note from the executor saying the beneficiaries disagreed about the dining suite.
What was itemized
Eleven lots: the dining suite, two pieces flagged as possibly period, a clock, a rug, and six items the executor had not mentioned but which the photographs surfaced.
What was grouped
Everything else, by room and category, valued as grouped contents and labelled as grouped so nobody reading it later mistakes the treatment.
What resolved the disagreement
Not the number itself but the reasoning under it — the dining suite was reported with the construction evidence for its period, so both beneficiaries were arguing with the same facts instead of with each other.
Three things that cost people money
All three are done with good intentions, usually by someone trying to help. They are worth knowing whoever you end up hiring.
- Clearing the house first
Once contents are dispersed, a retrospective valuation rests on memory and photographs that were never taken. Photograph everything before anything moves, even if no appraisal has been commissioned yet. It costs an hour and it is the single most useful thing an executor can do.
- Getting a verbal number from a buyer
Somebody offering to clear the house is quoting what they will pay, which is a legitimate offer and is not a valuation. It cannot be filed, and it will not survive a beneficiary's challenge.
- Assuming a valuation must be item by item
It usually should not be. A sensible lotting structure costs less and produces a more usable document than an inventory of every teaspoon.
Machinery & Equipment
A tractor, a CNC cell, an imaging suite or a whole facility inventory is personal property too, and it is usually worth more than everything else in the estate combined. Same appraiser, same standard, its own schedule of comparables.
| Scope | Typical fee |
|---|---|
| 1 item or lot | $75 – $150 |
| 2–10 items | $125 – $250 |
| 11–50 items | $200 – $400 |
| 50+ items / full contents | quoted per engagement |
Related personal property assets
Questions about household contents
Do you come to the house?
Not usually, and not needing to is what keeps the fee down. Room photographs plus close views of anything significant are enough for most contents assignments. Where an on-site visit is genuinely warranted you will be told before it is quoted.
The house has already been cleared. Can you still value it?
Possibly, as a retrospective valuation from whatever record exists — photographs, an inventory, sale receipts, insurance schedules. The limitations get stated in the report. It is harder and less certain than doing it before the clearance, and it is frequently still worth doing.
Can one report cover the estate and the division?
Often yes, where the intended use and the standard of value are the same for both. Say at the outset who will read it — adding an intended user afterwards can mean new work, and that is worth avoiding by mentioning it in the first email.
What if almost nothing is valuable?
You will be told that, and if a full appraisal is not warranted you will be told that too. Talking somebody out of an appraisal they do not need costs one phone call and is the reason a fair number of people come back.
Ready for a number you can defend?
Tell us what you have and what it's for. You get a fixed written quote — never an hourly meter, never a sales call.
What the work actually looks like
Real assignments, client details removed — what each engagement actually turned on, rather than how it felt.
A house, a workshop of machine tools, a forty-year firearms collection and a stake in the family company — four disciplines that three appraisers had only partly covered. One engagement, one effective date, one set of assumptions.
A donation the regulations would have aggregated past the appraisal threshold, which the donor had assessed item by item. One qualified appraisal covering the group, itemized, signed inside the window the regulations allow.
An opposing report whose number was not obviously wrong — which is what made it dangerous. It failed on its own certification, and was answered section by section with an independent valuation to the correct definition of value.